Monday, May 7, 2012

As The Campaign Begins: Let's Get Real

I feel sorry for Mitt Romney, Barack Obama too. In the next
six months these two men will compete for the Presidency of the United States, perhaps
the most powerful job in the world. With
the push of a button a President can start a nuclear war.With the right speech he can rally a country.With the stroke of a pen as she signs a law she
can change millions of lives. A great President can lead the secular salvation
of a nation. Think FDR or Lincoln.But
in 2012 there is one thing both candidates for Commander in Chief seem
powerless, or unwilling, or both, to do.

That is to be real. Be really
real. Be themselves. Go off script. Be true to whom, at their core, they
finally are and embody what they believe in and what they truly hold dear. Tell
the truth. Be the truth. Be authentic.

That’s why Romney gets my sympathy. Candidate Romney often comes
across as uncomfortable in his own skin, awkward, even desperate to please
whatever group of voters he stands before. Romney can appear tentative, grasping
to figure out just who he is supposed to be at any given moment.Then the press (liberal and conservative)
pounds him for being “stiff”. Then his political machine counters that hey, he
really, really is a great guy, really, down to earth, real. America just has
to get to know him. Romney can’t seem to win this fight.

As noted in a recent Salt Lake Tribune article by
Peggy Fletcher Stack: “The Mitt Romney…on the campaign trail is often depicted
as wealthy, wooden and out of touch…gaffe-prone, detached, distant.…But Philip
Barlow, a counselor and friend to Romney, when he was a Mormon leader in
Massachusetts in the 1980’s and early 90’s, counters: ‘Asking [Romney] to
appear more informal is ironically asking him to become less authentic so that
he can appear as more authentic.We
ought to allow him to be who he is and make our judgment on that basis.’”

Allow a candidate to be who he or she is and then make a
judgment on that basis alone: there’s an idea! To vote for an authentic man or
woman: no gloss, no façade, no smoke and mirrors. To expect our leaders to be real.

Remember the “beer summit” early on in Obama’s Presidency?This is what it looks like when politicians
are forced or choose to be inauthentic, fake, false.An African-American Harvard professor is
arrested by a white Cambridge
police officer. Obama honestly weighs in. The media explodes and so these three
men then have to gather on the back lawn of the White House in shirt sleeves to
drink beer together and make nice, all for the cameras.Awkward.So clearly an act.That day I
felt pretty bad for the President.

What might it look like if voters and the media empowered
our Presidential candidates to be authentic?What might happen if we worried less about whether or not a candidate is
the kind of person “we’d like to drink a beer with” and demanded instead a
candidate who could just do the job and do it well? A President not as image or
press release but a flesh and blood person, neither super heroic nor a political
anti-Christ, just human.

Liberals might then give the President a break and allow him
to be the political moderate he finally is. Conservatives might give Romney a
break and allow him to be the political pragmatist he finally is.

Romney critics might finally accept that Romney is a very
wealthy, highly successful businessman, a squeaky clean straight arrow family
guy and a committed Mormon. Wearing jeans and rolling up his button down shirts
won’t change him.Obama critics might
stop beating up on the President for lacking “fire” and accept that Obama is
professorial at heart, thoughtful and smart and more committed to crafting
attainable solutions than partisan people pleasing or smarmy glad handing.Drinking a beer in the backyard won’t change him.

Then maybe these two real people could run a full bore
honest debate through to next November about the future of the United States
and who is best qualified to lead us. We’d all get to vote for an authentic
person to be our next President. No artifice. No media spin. No political
machinations or myth-making.

One of the best gifts my faith gives me is the call by my
Creator to be authentic, to be real, to be both the good and the flawed human
being I am.Or as Hamlet said in William
Shakespeare’s play of the same name, “This above all: To thine own self be
true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to
any man.”

I know this hope for presidential candidate authenticity is radically
counter to our multi-billion dollar presidential campaigns with spin doctors
and image creators scrambling to present their candidate as “real”, and a press
talking so much more about appearances and style than real issues. The voters who hope to drink a beer with the
President don’t help much either.Could
we go any lower in our presidential expectations?

The huge problems our nation and world face call not for
actors on a stage, but leaders in the real world. So President Obama and
Governor Romney, here is my unsolicited advice to you both as the campaign
begins: to thine own self be true.